Page 275 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

L1644_C06.fm Page 248 Monday, October 20, 2003 12:06 PM

Municipal solid waste
in municipalities
Transports

Incineration Transports Waste
process treatment

Landfill

FIGURE 6.18 Boundaries of the studied system. (Reprinted from J. Hazardous Mater., 77,
Sonnemann, G.W. et al., pp. 91–106, ©2000 with permission from Elsevier.)

of values published in the literature to estimate environmental damages. The selected
weighting and aggregation scheme corresponds to the one presented as an example in
Figure 6.9, which means that three indicators have been selected for the weighting of
impacts. For the human health and manmade environment AoPs, external environmen-
tal costs (EEC) according to the European Commission (EC 1995) have been used.
A lot of criticism exists concerning monetary evaluation of environmental dam-
ages. For this reason, special attention is paid to arguments to monetize these
damages. The impossibility of summing up the noneconomic impact endpoints
necessarily implies a value judgment. Because most decisions must confront the
reality of the market place, the most useful measure is the cost of the damages. This
information allows society to decide how much should be done for the protection
of the environment by public institutions and how much of the damage cost should
be internalized so that a functional unit is consistent with the market. Further
information on this topic can be found in Chapter 3 and in the huge externality
studies for electricity production carried out in parallel in the EU (EC, 1995) and
U.S. (ORNL/REF 1995).
No acceptable economic method exists for damage evaluation of the natural
environment AoP (biodiversity and landscape). Therefore, the evaluation must be
carried out through an ecological damage parameter. In the present study, the param-
eter applied is the REW ecosystem area in which the critical load of a pollutant is
exceeded (UN-ECE, 1991); see also Chapter 3 for details.
The global damages that might occur in the future due to the emission of
greenhouse gases are highly uncertain for forecasting and monetization. Therefore,
the climate change has been expressed in the form of the GWP as in the LCIA
(Albritton and Derwent, 1995).
The potential occurrence of accidents is not considered in this case study.
Uncertainty analysis for the LCI and the site-specific environmental impact assess-
ment of the MSWI emissions are described in Chapter 5. An environmental risk
assessment for the same plant has been carried out and the results are presented in
Chapters 4 and 5. Based on the results of the environmental damage estimations of
the waste incineration process chain, the eco-efficiency will also be calculated.

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